100 books like Rivers of Iron

The first step to enriching perspectives on China is to go there—something more difficult in times of COVID and political tensions. One of the most pleasant virtual visits is to take a back seat as Peter Hessler roams the Great Wall backcountry. He does American things in an un-American place: getting a driver’s license, renting a car, meeting hitchhikers, countryfolk, and their city kids. He moves on to the factories, and we meet the Chinese that put the “Made in China” label on our daily world. Hessler is a regular at the New Yorker, is living in China, and always a good read.

Home is Not Here is a touching autobiographical account of a past Chinese world completely different in time and place from that of Hessler’s explorations. In the first half of the twentieth century millions of Chinese left China and migrated to Southeast Asia, including Wang’s parents. Wang traces their struggles to maintain their Chinese identity as minorities in different cultures. In telling his family’s story he gives a vivid picture of the upheavals and tribulations of both China and Southeast Asia in a troubled era. Wang Gungwu is my favorite historian of China, and author of many books on the grand sweep of Chinese history, but here we see China’s and Asia’s most turbulent era from a personal perspective.

Until his death in 2020 Ezra Vogel was Harvard’s preeminent scholar on East Asia, and the author of classics on both China and Japan. This book is special, however, because in it Vogel uses his mastery of both Chinese and Japanese histories and cultures to explain each to the other. He relates how each has contributed to the core identity of the other. For outsiders like myself, reading Vogel’s grand narrative of the interaction of China and Japan is a reminder of the complexities of national identity. Civilizations do clash, and certainly China and Japan have done so. But they learn from each other as well.

Qin is the former president of China Foreign Affairs University and China’s foremost thinker on international relationships. This book is not an easy read, but it is worth the effort because Qin presents an original perspective on world affairs that is rooted in Chinese intellectual traditions. In contrast to current theories of international relations, Qin emphasizes the importance of relationships over transactions—attention to managing long-term, particular connections rather than “the art of the deal.” In addition, he describes a dialectic based on the mutual transformation of opposites—a yin-yang relationship—rather than the usual Western assumption of separate categories. Qin is a hard read because he is presenting a new way of thinking.

This book explains how a powerful sultanate located on an archipel in the South China Sea maintained its independence until the very end of the nineteenth century. Being the centre of a ferocious slave-raiding network, it played a pivotal role in supplying the slave labour for commodity production both for China and the West. Warren’s book links an upsurge of slave raiding in Southeast Asia at the end of the eighteenth century with imperial expansion of the West and the economic resurrection of China. It questions the dominant perception that piracy and slavery in Asia were antithetical to economic growth.

I find Warren’s thesis tremendously valuable to understand processes of globalisation and a source of inspiration for my own research and teaching on slavery in the Indonesian archipelago in the nineteenth century. It also opened my eyes to the fact that the upsurge of slave-raiding was fed by illicit arms… show more.

This work is thorough and informative on the US invasion and defeat but unlike many books on the war also provides extensive discussion of Vietnam’s long history, which dates back more than two millennia. It covers Vietnam’s contentious relations with China and France.

Regilme studies the negative impact of US foreign aid on Philippines’s and Thailand’s human rights. He argues that the shared policy expectations between the donors and recipient governments and the domestic legitimacy of recipient regime jointly determine the extent of human rights abuse. The recipients with strong domestic legitimacy need only use the foreign aid on legitimate military threats. This was the case for the Philippines and Thailand in the 1990s. When the domestic legitimacy of the recipient regime is weak, that foreign aid is strategically repurposed to include the repression of the political opposition. This explains the human rights abuse in Thaksin and Arroyo administrations. The book helps us understand how authoritarian aid recipients can manipulate foreign aid to seek political survival. 

To be honest, I didn't like this book when I was reading early chapters, which focus solely on American efforts to utilize Buddhism as a sort of “spiritual weapon” to counter the appeal of Communism in Southeast Asia, notably in Thailand. I thought it too U.S.-centric and an overly top-down narrative. However, my doubts dispelled when I continued to read the middle and, particularly, the last two chapters, where the author discusses how Thai Buddhist monks also used Cold War politics and U.S. support in their attempts to expand their roles in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and to safeguard the three pillars of Thai’s traditional order: nation, religion, and king. 

What is most interesting is that, at the height of fears of communism in the early 1970s (that is, the time of the Vietnam War and U.S. withdrawal from it), the right-wing faction of Thai Buddhist monks embraced militant anti-communism,… show more.

This book became the starting point for many publications on slavery in Southeast Asia. It is a collection of essays that not only provides us with an overview of the entire region over the past 700 years but also suggests how we can study the multifarious forms of slavery and bondage in the region in a comparative manner. Although almost forty years old it is still indispensable reading for any course on slavery in Southeast Asia, including my own course.

Lost, confused, and feeling the victim, Ethan visits Thailand. He falls down a sinkhole into an alternate reality. Even more lost among really weird people, feeling even more confused and victimized, he learns the true meaning of life. But can he get back to live his real life?

Who hasn’t tumbled into Ethan’s emotions? We go along thinking we’re doing good and suddenly the worst happens. We didn’t deserve any of it yet we’re stuck alone and destitute in it.

Ethan meets an archaeologist who introduces him to indigenous people and their ghost stories. I love cultural studies, sociology,  archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics, all sciences represented in this story. Reality gets smudged and blurred, but love, loyalty, and forgiveness remain true and unshaken in this beautiful story of redemption.